"Mexicans and Machines"

I'm no fan of Drew Carey's comedy--I still consider his sitcom the unfunniest one that ever sullied my TV screen--but I have to say, the man makes a righteous political commentator. Just take a look at this latest missive on Reason TV, in response to certain politicians'










and prime-time talk show gasbags'











rampant anti-NAFTA demagogy:

http://www.reason.tv/video/show/451.html

Seriously! Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-check it out!!

A Breath of Fresh Obamair

Senator Barack Obama, today: “I disagree with the decision [i.e. the recent Supreme Court decision striking down the death penalty for child rapists as cruel and unusual punishment]. ...I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances, for the most egregious of crimes. I think that the rape of a small child--six or eight years old--is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision that, under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances, the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution. Now...had the Supreme Court said ‘We want to constrain the ability of states to do this to make sure that it's done in a careful and appropriate way’, that would have been one thing. But it basically had a blanket prohibition and I disagree with that decision.”

Fascinating.

It's nice to hear a prominent Democrat finally showing a willingness to disagree with a Supreme Court decision that happens to adhere to his party's orthodoxy. It is safe to presume that liberals, many of whom oppose capital punishment in toto, pretty much all oppose it as punishment for any crime other than murder. A five-Justice majority has just endorsed this position. I actually personally share this particular view; I'm just not sure that the (unelected and unaccountable) Supreme Court is justified in forcing it on (democratically elected and accountable) American policymakers, given the vagueness of the Constitution's “cruel and unusual punishment” clause. (I especially can't abide this “evolving standards of decency” bovine excrement—definitely one of the most ludicrous excuses for a constitutional test the Court has cooked up since the ditzy “penumbras” and “emanations” of yesteryear—that Justice Kennedy dusted off from the Roper v. Simmons case of several years ago to employ once more.)

Can it finally have dawned on Senator Obama that the Justices on the Court—even the liberal ones!—cannot be trusted to substitute their own judgment, heavily colored as it is by their ideological predilections, for the guidance provided by the written text of the Constitution itself? That activist interpretations of that august eighteenth-century parchment—with their dubious distortions of the Constitution’s meaning that go far beyond what the Framers and their successors enshrined in writing—are no more legitimate when they happen to suit his liberal policy agenda than they are when they happen to suit his opponents’? That the Constitution means only what it actually says—nothing more, nothing less?

Of course, I have my doubts, and even if this salient fact has dawned on the esteemed Senator, I imagine he wouldn’t dare risk unnerving his base even more than this latest statement probably already has by saying so in public. Suffice it to express my own personal pleasure at seeing Obama’s display of a modicum of political courage in critiquing a decision handed down from on high by the Gnomes of Foggy Bottom that must have warmed most liberals’ hearts. Obama seems to have be on the cusp of the realization that there is more to being a solid interpreter of the Constitution than “having empathy for the powerless” or “knowing what it’s like to be black, or female, or poor, or gay”, to paraphrase the criteria based on which he has claimed he would select his Supreme Court nominees as president.

The hell of it is that this particular decision needn’t have been the catalyst for this potential epiphany, for as stated above, the Court’s opinion in this case may not necessarily be a case of judicial activism per se. At least this majority opinion actually had a textual leg to stand on—namely, the Eighth Amendment—and the Justices may arguably be on solid ground in using their own judgment to interpret the unhelpfully vague Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause, lest this crucial star in the constitutional firmament go completely unenforced. If only the Court would discard such deeply flawed tools as the fatuous “evolving standards of decency” test, I might actually side with the Learned Elders of First Street against the Democratic Party’s newly christened Boy Wonder.

"Screwing the Pooch"...

...as I while away my days looking for post-graduate employment, the above-mentioned naughty little expression crosses my mind. When did bestiality become a metaphor for idleness anyway?

Obama & Hillary's Debt

Just a quick post to express my amusement at recent proposals, made most prominently by inveterate Clinton supporter and former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, for the Obama campaign and its supporters to donate money to the Clinton campaign to help defray the latter's debt. Only liberal Democrats could come up with such a jokey scheme. God forbid Senator Clinton should assume full responsibility for running her own campaign into the ground and deal with the consequences of her ineptitude. Does the mind really not rebel against any scenario in which the fair-and-square winner of a political contest owes the loser compensation?